Shock Doctrine on Music (thinkstrut-related)

SPlDEY

I've been slowly reading this book called, "The Shock Doctrine." A short video explaining about the book directed by Alfonso Cuaron:

I'm not a college student or anything, but this book has got my brain thinking about many different issues. However, it's been really interesting when applied to Music. I guess I never really put any thought into how the worlds crisis bring change.The wars of the Dark ages preceded the Church modes and Scales. The split of the Roman Catholic Church started The Renaissance. We all know that slavery precedes so many genres of music such as The Blues, Jazz, Gospel, Reggae, etc.. Jeff Chang's book, "Can't Stop Won't Stop," shows how society and economics were integral in the birth of Hip hop. I'm really interested in what some of the Struts great thinkers think about this topic. Can there be great change without crisis? How does this theory relate to the decline of our current music industry. Will we see a ressurgance of old ideas? Who's profitting from the death of the Music industry?- spidey

SPlDEY

Kala:

...i must have been a great place when the native americans were living here
before the great rub out

since then there has been many many overt and covert wars against many great leaders domestically and foreign [MLK,Malcom,RFK,JFK,allende,lumumba,castro,etc]near and far
does war supposedly make the country great?

what about slavery?

somehow out of that violence/servitude came the blues,jazz,art,funk,soul, and hip hop, as well as rock and roll
mostly music of the opressed and the dis-infranchised -african american/latinos
that is qute obvious
but to me its the fruit and the best part of the US experience not excluding hippy culture/pranksters/haight ashbury/LSD etc[technically imported from the swiss by the CIA]

I usually don't like to ever quote/agree with Kala, but it's probably the closest thing I found on this board about this topic.

- spidey

hemol

Taking this in a boit of a different diredction, though not entirely, you might want to check out a bit of Buckminster Fuller. As he sees it, the Human race--for the most part--does not invest in its own perpetuity until we reach crisis points. The structuring, and operation of governments is such that they take action only when the shit hits the fan.

Taking another approach there is a book published by Zone--Bruce Mau's publishing company--by Manuel De Landa called War in the Age of intelligent Machines. De Landa covers a lot of ground, but there is a specific intepretation of the concept of singularity that he implements. I'm pretty sure that singularity is normally used in Chaos Theory normally, but here he applies it to social sciences. De Landa suggests that all systems are in a state of chaos until they reach a kind of terminal, and extreme chaos--perhaps a crisis point--at which point systems become organized in ways previously unconsidered, or inconceivable. I think that this owuld bear particular significance in the case of what you are thinking about. He goes on further to add that the principal of chaos at work in systems that have yet to beomce organized, are a kind of organization that is yet to be. He uses the example of machines, and intelligent machines, stating that from one specific teleological persepctive human beings are merely a mass of chaos that is organizing intelligent machinery. It's not sci-fi at all. He's brilliant.


Yet another perspective is shared by Bruce Mau (uber design related). In the opening to his book Massive Change he talks about design, and it's relation to crisis and banality. Essentially, the job of a designer is to render complex tasks and objects banal. One of the exmaples that he uses is the collapse of Chernobyl, and another is airplane crashes. As he points out, we never really pay much attention--unless we're overly paranoid--to the mechanics of these types of processes until they fail. When planes crashed into the twin towers, and people started jumping from windows, the form of the skyscraper loses its abstarcted banality, and becomes immediately apparent. Again, we simply don't take note of what's going on around us unless we are pushed into extremes, or crisis.

Probably the most removed, and without a doubt the most difficult to digest, relevant text would be Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. They talk about rhizomes, deterritorialization/reterritorialization, planes of consistency, articulation/content, and lines of flight. All of these concepts deal with the idea that any action, object, or concept is at all times inchoate around us, and we merely manage to assemble specific configurations from this invisible primordial goo. So then, slavery and the blues would be part of a singular plane of consistency. Each is merely a different articulation of this singular plane.


Hope that helped.

mannybolone

Can there be great change without crisis? How does this theory relate to the decline of our current music industry. Will we see a ressurgance of old ideas? Who's profitting from the death of the Music industry?

- spidey

There seems to be a false analogy here: the "death of the Music industry" isn't remotely similar to the larger social conditions you refer to.

The music industry might claim to be "in crisis" but that's not the same thing as a social crisis. Who outside Sony-BMG's stockholders really give a fuck if they can't sell CDs like they did 10 years ago? It's not like dropping the BQE onto the South Bronx, White flight from South Los Angeles, or decades of Jim Crow. Am I missing something?

hemol

There seems to be a false analogy here: the "death of the Music industry" isn't remotely similar to the larger social conditions you refer to.

The music industry might claim to be "in crisis" but that's not the same thing as a social crisis. Who outside Sony-BMG's stockholders really give a fuck if they can't sell CDs like they did 10 years ago? It's not like dropping the BQE onto the South Bronx, White flight from South Los Angeles, or decades of Jim Crow. Am I missing something?

I think you may be making the wrong correlation O. I think that point that Spidey was getting at is that crisis is a precursor to change. The music industry is in a state of crisis. This crisis is not a social detriment--as slavery or war is--so much as a contained system of crisis affecting only the music industry. The music industry as a system has reached a breaking point. The means have swollen beyond the ends, so there has to be a restructuring. It is only once the shit has hit the fan that change becomes a desirable thing.

SPlDEY

Taking this in a boit of a different diredction, though not entirely, you might want to check out a bit of Buckminster Fuller. As he sees it, the Human race--for the most part--does not invest in its own perpetuity until we reach crisis points. (1) The structuring, and operation of governments is such that they take action only when the shit hits the fan.[/b]

Taking another approach there is a book published by Zone--Bruce Mau's publishing company--by Manuel De Landa called War in the Age of intelligent Machines. De Landa covers a lot of ground, but there is a specific intepretation of the concept of singularity that he implements. I'm pretty sure that singularity is normally used in Chaos Theory normally, but here he applies it to social sciences. (2)De Landa suggests that all systems are in a state of chaos until they reach a kind of terminal, and extreme chaos--perhaps a crisis point--at which point systems become organized in ways previously unconsidered, or inconceivable.[/b] I think that this owuld bear particular significance in the case of what you are thinking about. He goes on further to add that the principal of chaos at work in systems that have yet to beomce organized, are a kind of organization that is yet to be. He uses the example of machines, and intelligent machines, stating that from one specific teleological persepctive human beings are merely a mass of chaos that is organizing intelligent machinery. It's not sci-fi at all. He's brilliant.


Yet another perspective is shared by Bruce Mau (uber design related). In the opening to his book Massive Change he talks about design, and it's relation to crisis and banality. Essentially, the job of a designer is to render complex tasks and objects banal. One of the exmaples that he uses is the collapse of Chernobyl, and another is airplane crashes. As he points out, we never really pay much attention--unless we're overly paranoid--to the mechanics of these types of processes until they fail. When planes crashed into the twin towers, and people started jumping from windows, the form of the skyscraper loses its abstarcted banality, and becomes immediately apparent. Again, we simply don't take note of what's going on around us unless we are pushed into extremes, or crisis.

Probably the most removed, and without a doubt the most difficult to digest, relevant text would be Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. They talk about rhizomes, deterritorialization/reterritorialization, planes of consistency, articulation/content, and lines of flight. (3) All of these concepts deal with the idea that any action, object, or concept is at all times inchoate around us, and we merely manage to assemble specific configurations from this invisible primordial goo.[/b] So then, slavery and the blues would be part of a singular plane of consistency. Each is merely a different articulation of this singular plane.


Hope that helped.

Man.. thanks for taking the time to articulate that. I will most definitely be hitting the library after this book to delve further on the subject. Naomi Klein's book definitely focuses on the people who benefit from the destruction of others. It reminds me of the quote:

"When there's blood on the streets, buy property." - Baron de Rothschild

1. Fuller is definitely on to something with that. That is something that to me seems so inherently human. Nobody really wants to pay for insurance until they really need it. yknow..

2. Spot on. It even relates to my life in the way that I'm constantly letting shit pile up on my desk until it gets to the point where I need to clear it, and organize my shit. It's definitely a bit of procrastination in my personality that I'm always trying to improve.

3. That one is pretty heavy. However, I understand it's relevance to the discussion. Anything conceptualized can be changed by another idea. That's what makes alot of these paid thinkers and economists so potent, because they view it on a theoretical level. Where people are numbers and figures and decimals.

Getting back to the topic though, I think that alot of the stuff that's going on with file sharing is definitely bringing upon a change to peoples opinions on the value of music. Will it lead to new opportunitys for artists and distributors? Most definitely. I think it's well needed that the current music industry goes through a reformation period. They've been running a tight game that I know most people don't agree with, and it needs to end. The fact that the RIAA is willing to sue random filesharers is proof that something has got to change.

- spidey

mannybolone

This crisis is not a social detriment--as slavery or war is--so much as a contained system of crisis affecting only the music industry. The music industry as a system has reached a breaking point. The means have swollen beyond the ends, so there has to be a restructuring. It is only once the shit has hit the fan that change becomes a desirable thing.

In that case, I don't think crisis is a necessary pre-cursor to change (even though I think, as you note, you'd expect to see change arising out of crisis). Technology often provides a means of significant change absent an immediate crisis to spark it off. I suppose it depends on how you look at it though; the Cold War produced the technological infrastructure that created the Internet but I don't know if it'd be correct to say that the Internet itself (and all the change it wrought) was created out of crisis, not directly.

Reynaldo

Kala:

...i must have been a great place when the native americans were living here
before the great rub out

since then there has been many many overt and covert wars against many great leaders domestically and foreign [MLK,Malcom,RFK,JFK,allende,lumumba,castro,etc]near and far
does war supposedly make the country great?

what about slavery?

somehow out of that violence/servitude came the blues,jazz,art,funk,soul, and hip hop, as well as rock and roll
mostly music of the opressed and the dis-infranchised -african american/latinos
that is qute obvious
but to me its the fruit and the best part of the US experience not excluding hippy culture/pranksters/haight ashbury/LSD etc[technically imported from the swiss by the CIA]

I usually don't like to ever quote/agree with Kala, but it's probably the closest thing I found on this board about this topic.

- spidey

I'd argue that those genres would have arisen under more normally adverse (non-slavery) conditions anyway, and that the absence of slavery was a bigger factor than slavery itself. Hundreds of years of slavery just seems too high a price to pay for good music, especially for the people actually paying it.

white_tea

I'll have to watch the video later, but it definitely seems logical. Kinda reminds me of this quote from The Third Man:

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

SPlDEY

This crisis is not a social detriment--as slavery or war is--so much as a contained system of crisis affecting only the music industry. The music industry as a system has reached a breaking point. The means have swollen beyond the ends, so there has to be a restructuring. It is only once the shit has hit the fan that change becomes a desirable thing.

In that case, I don't think crisis is a necessary pre-cursor to change (even though I think, as you note, you'd expect to see change arising out of crisis). Technology often provides a means of significant change absent an immediate crisis to spark it off. I suppose it depends on how you look at it though; the Cold War produced the technological infrastructure that created the Internet but I don't know if it'd be correct to say that the Internet itself (and all the change it wrought) was created out of crisis, not directly.

Right on the nose Hemol.

O, has anyone ever documented the economic changes that came with the birth of the cd and the death of vinyl? I wonder how many people profitted from the change to a digital technology.

It's not a Crisis per se, but i'm sure there were some thinkers for some major companys saying, "Can the consumers really hear the difference?" "No more crackles or skipping who doesn't want this?" Now alot of cds aren't worth the plastic they're burned onto. Music is becoming disposable. Ipods only last what 2 years? I'm reading all over about a Vinyl ressurgance right.

- spidey

mannybolone

This crisis is not a social detriment--as slavery or war is--so much as a contained system of crisis affecting only the music industry. The music industry as a system has reached a breaking point. The means have swollen beyond the ends, so there has to be a restructuring. It is only once the shit has hit the fan that change becomes a desirable thing.

In that case, I don't think crisis is a necessary pre-cursor to change (even though I think, as you note, you'd expect to see change arising out of crisis). Technology often provides a means of significant change absent an immediate crisis to spark it off. I suppose it depends on how you look at it though; the Cold War produced the technological infrastructure that created the Internet but I don't know if it'd be correct to say that the Internet itself (and all the change it wrought) was created out of crisis, not directly.

Right on the nose Hemol.

O, has anyone ever documented the economic changes that came with the birth of the cd and the death of vinyl? I wonder how many people profitted from the change to a digital technology.

It's not a Crisis per se, but i'm sure there were some thinkers for some major companys saying, "Can the consumers really hear the difference?" "No more crackles or skipping who doesn't want this?" Now alot of cds aren't worth the plastic they're burned onto. Music is becoming disposable. Ipods only last what 2 years? I'm reading all over about a Vinyl ressurgance right.

- spidey

Personally, I don't think physical music media is ever going to enjoy the popularity it once did though there will still be a large portion of the buying public who still is down for a physical CD or LP. People STILL buy the bulk of their music through a "conventional" means but give it another half generation or so and I'm sure we'll get to the point where digital consumption overtakes physical media.

As for the economic changes from the shift from LP to CD - I'm certain that's easily and well documented. Music companies went to do town on that; not from new releases, but from re-selling catalog items that people owned on LP but wanted to replace with CDs. Ah, the good old days.

SPlDEY

Right now, I know that in the Movie industry they're having a format war to replace the DVD. It's like when Betamax died out from VHS every household had to get the new technology cause all the companys supported it. Then when Dvd's Came around VHS died, and the process repeated itself. It's a process that keeps people updating there equipment$$, and rebuying there movies$$. Now it's Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD's, and who knows from there. Again none of these are CRISIS, but alot of these "So-called" Technology updates keep bringing new money to these old companies. However there's no alternatives for the consumer it's update or get left behind.

- spidey